Labour should be tough on social security, in the right ways

We lefties are supposed to be open-handed with the taxpayer's money, if the Press is to be believed. Anyone needing to supplement their resources should just be able to apply for this or that and receive it in due course.

It has never been this way; nor should it. Our first desire is that everyone should be able to earn a living, so that social security becomes unnecessary. In order to be able to fund, though, those calls on social security which are merited and important, we have to ensure that the country first raises the proper sums from those who ought to pay; and then does not profligately hand it all out to the wrong people.

It has become quite loathsome how people unable to afford for their meagre rations to be reduced are demonised and squeezed by this awful Government, so lets help Labour to get it right when we are back in power. Here are a couple of true-life examples which I encountered only this week to help them find better targets:

Ms A is 22. She is a single mother of one baby, living in the home of her middle-class professional parents. She is casting around to find a home for her, her boyfriend and her baby, near to where she has been brought up. Mummy and Daddy will guarantee her rent - though are not proposing to pay it. In the area concerned, rents are expensive so she plans to seek housing benefit. Is this right, when by moving out of her parental home she will be burdening the taxpayer?

Mrs B is in her 60s and very wealthy, with a very old mother suffering from dementia. Her mother lives a few miles away still in her own flat, where she receives substantial care and support from the NHS and Social Services. Her daughter visits regularly. The latter wants to go away on a foreign holiday for a week, ie will not be able to make her usual filial visits for a few days. Her mother's care will be uninterrupted. The daughter is claiming to be a carer, entitled to respite and the funding for this.

The cost to the State of these 2 examples may not break the bank but they exemplify how it is so often not the poorest in society who rip it off, but those who do not need help at all. It is surely to these that the attention of tax and social security scrutiny should turn, alongside the tax avoiders and bonus grabbers. As a "lefty" I will be happy to be tough on this sort of abuse.

Health is where the home is

It must by now be a given that integrated, whole person care is the vision for the future of Local Authority Adult Social Services and the NHS. Reducing hospital admissions and stays is essential, in fewer centres of excellence but with wider community outreach. Having a single nominee to whom all issues relating to wellbeing can be referred by each patient, with the authority to channel resources and with home as the default point of delivery is an idea which must be brought to fruition. But how? Demands on medical and care resources already exceed supply and will continue to grow. With current budgets for adult care and health in separate hands all clinging onto every penny they can in the face of cuts; with hospital, GP and care priorities varying in different parts of the country; with gaps in skills and capacity required to fulfil the required roles; with the need for a change in culture across tens of thousands of healthcare professionals; and with the problem of defining care vs subsistence costs, this transition cannot be easy or rapid. Labour is however a party with a value of long-termism.

So what would we have a Labour Government promise by way of steps towards the vision?

First, it has to redefine the nation’s priorities. Just what is the role of the State? How much tax income should be raised and what are the priorities for its use? Labour must ignore the Right’s sneering accusations that it will merely borrow or tax more. Within existing financial resources, responsible application of funds does not need merely to reflect the current Government’s choices. Nor, we argue, does the economic policy have to reflect the constraints applied by Osborne. This is a wealthy country which has used its credit to refinance banks and stimulate house-buying. It can do the same to rebuild those aspects of the State being wrecked for the sake of neoliberal ideology. If the economy is about people as well as finance, the building of integrated care must have precedence over debt repayment, low taxes for the wealth, and unjustified vanity projects like HS2 and Trident replacement. This need not only entail direct taxation as its source. Equity release on existing homes; loans against the collateral of estates after death; housing bonds purchased earlier in life backed by a State bank are all options which the State can facilitate to avoid having to levy excessive new taxes. It can no longer be taboo to require people with wealth to apply this to their own care rather than to bequeathing it to their descendents and depending on others’ taxes.

How, specifically, is this money to be directed? Local authorities must be given the duty to meet the care needs of their senior and disabled populations to a decent standard, backed by central Government guarantees for the financing. First, encouraging people to elect to live where they can obtain integrated care is highly desirable but requires enabling. Meeting the increasing demand for single-person, independent living is crucial. Building complexes whether rented or owned, houses or flats, in which shared skilled care can be available to people as needed, will create jobs while offering people the best chance of staying out of hospital. Consistent with our conclusions on both economic growth and the environment, home-building should be a major plank of the future of healthcare in this country. Second, it must fund the recruitment, training and proper remuneration and management of professional care workers, both residential and community-based, in sufficient quantity to provide the levels of care any person would wish for their own family member, regardless of wealth.

Politics must be rooted in communities

Just back from a leisure visit to Strasbourg. Lovely city. What struck me was its self-confidence and sense of identity. This goes back all through its history, when it has more than once declared itself a republic (good idea!) with its own identity, economy and religious or humanist attitudes different from those of its neighbours or "host" country. Alsace's food, wine, architecture and culture are quite distinct from those of France [now] or Germany [at other times].
So why report this? It seems to me that one of this country's problems lies in its London-centricity. What is written about in the media is dominated by London, whether this concerns fashion, arts or politics. A small coterie of institutions mainly based in London dominates thought and action, often with little understanding or consideration for other parts of the country.
Where are our Strasbourgs? Until the middle of the last century cities like Birmingham and Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool were the powerhouses of the country, with their industries and civic economies writ large and manifested in the great buildings and influence on national policy. The post-war period has seen this diluted and industry has been wrecked in the name of financial services, with local government reduced to insignificance by the centrism of both Labour and Tory governments. Now we are in a presidential age with few voters really aware of local leaders' names and roles.
Labour has to reconnect with people across the country; people whose lives are in communities, not merely subservient to London. We should, before it is all lost, celebrate local cultures, local differences, local needs by encouraging local politics, empowered by local knowledge and with control of assets and tax income. It takes true leadership to let go - Ed Miliband can show this leadership by relaxing some aspects of central control and allowing localism to flourish instead of stifling the country in a blanket of uniformity in which nobody feels pride or engagement.

Tom Serpell

UK has not run out of money - but people may!

To read the emissions of the Government or the right-wing Press, one could think that UK was in line for food bank help, being broke. This is far from the case. We are a nation rich in assets, resources, creditworthiness and revenues. How we choose to use these is what policies and politics are about.

Paying interest on debt is something anyone would elect to avoid unless the rates were insignificant. A highly credit-worthy economy borrows at low rates so this reduces the priority for minimisation of debt unless for other, perhaps doctrinaire or political reasons. Such reasons have, however, caused the Government to inflict on consumers an unnecessary squeeze on income [either earned or welfare] and rise in living costs. Unfortunately, consumers are unable to borrow at the same low levels of interest as nations, so their need to borrow in order to sustain well-being through the austerity results in an increase in their debt and interest liability. In other words, people bear the cost of the Government's decisions and act contrary to their instincts.

How a nation uses its resources is also a political issue. This Government has opted to pay off debt, refinance banks and reduce public expenditure, in the name of economic prudence. It could equally have chosen to prioritise the well-being of the people over that of financial targets; or even just raised taxes to ensure the maintenance of effective public services. It did not do so not because it could not but because it chose not to. It has a clear object, indeed, of destroying the very idea of public services, so little insight does it have into the realities of life form any of its voters and so little altruism.

Do we, the people, want to live in a country devoid of the means to help those who for whatever reason are not able to achieve levels of earnings sufficient for independent living? Do we accept it as our role to bear consequences of the gambles made with our money by others? Should we be in debt so that institutions remain able to function largely unchallenged and unaccountable? Should we have lower well-being whilst a few cream off the communal assets of our country? If not, we must elect a Government with a view of economics as concerned with people as well as with balance sheets. By all means let it reduce debt but let this be done at the expense of those who created it.

Dont look back

Tempting as it is to see the Atlee Government as a golden heyday of radical innovation in social politics, to attempt a replay would seem a counterproductive. The world has changed. There may be - are - parallels in today's UK with the post-war austerity but ours is self-imposed by a doctrinaire Government trying to turn the clock back to the feudal centuries rather than one caused by paying for a war we had to fight. Then unions had millions of members working collectively. Today we have a fragmented workforce lacking cohesion and representation. What Labour must surely offer now is new vision - a description of a country to be desired, with social objectives as well as purely economic; with goals for inclusion, community democracy, transparency and accountability - a better place to live in for everybody. This vision needs fleshing out with a road-map of policies which will take us beyond mere slogans and offer concrete examples of what we can expect when we vote for a Labour Government. Lets have that future painted for us and not hanker after what was.

Climate Change at home; a distinctive position for Labour

The environment is the world in which everyone must function. As it changes [and it surely does] unless people adapt, our ability to function will be affected. Efforts across the globe to reduce or reverse climate change have fallen foul of both the enormity of that task and the impossibility of all nations agreeing and acting in concert. Those who advocate mitigation as the political response to climate change are left with Canute’s task. The parties of the Right have now adopted a laissez faire, non-interventionist approach, based on adaptations after the event and motivated by short-term profit opportunities. Labour has been unfortunately silent, failing to define mid- to long-term objectives for energy supply, population density and location or land use. Your Britain barely has a mention of the subject. This is unsatisfactory not least because it leaves Labour bereft of a counter to Tory policies, such as they may be. With values including long-termism, localism and mutuality, Labour must address this vacuum, which fails those whose needs are explicitly omitted from the thinking of the Right – the majority.

Climate change impacts societies in a variety of aspects to variable degree: drought; wind; flooding; temperature; sea level; disease and social conflict resulting from population pressures.  In this country the greatest impact is likely to centre on housing, which coincidentally brings it into greatest relevance to voters. There is already a need for a huge affordable house-building programme which may be exacerbated by inward migration from countries more severely climatically affected. Sea level rise may affect coastal communities including major cities. Housing will become uninsurable in flood plains. Energy and water usage need mitigating in the housing stock as a whole. These are issues which a failed market model cannot decide, driven purely as it is by building what profits private sector developers, currently sitting on land banks on which thousands of homes could have been built.

Communities [perhaps defined as counties for this purpose] need to determine their own needs informed by national plans. Local government must have the duty and the wherewithal:

·         to prioritise land use, between flood protection, food production, economic development, infrastructure and housing;

·         to obtain, compulsorily if need be, at current use values, the land needed to build energy-efficient houses for people of all income levels and family sizes;

·         to access the capital required to build the resource-efficient homes the future local population will need to buy or rent; 

·         to decide on infrastructure needs according to population plans;

·         to invest in energy generation and water usage consistent with local natural resources.

Managing these pressures will most effectively stifle risks of civil dissent or unrest, whilst engaging local voters in a global issue which may otherwise appear beyond their influence.

In short, Labour should adopt a policy of predictive adaptation to climate change; delegating implementation of an integrated approach to local needs to re-envigoured, democratically accountable and properly financed County/Unitary Councils. National Government should invest in understanding and advising on population and climatic sciences; in financing the Local Authorities; and mandating standards for design and insurance of homes for all.

Rural and coastal deprivation in affluent South-East

It probably sounds like a sob story to speak of deprivation in the well-heeled and desirable East Sussex. But just as it can be very lonely in a crowd, being surrounded by careless wealth can make it even harder to bear poverty than where everyone is suffering together. The strength of community is not there to sustain those who are unfortunate financially. Indeed as a report recently published by the Sussex Community Foundation has illustrated, being poor in rural places can be extreme in its effects. Housing is far more expensive than in less well-appointed areas; and transport is a requirement not always shared by urban poor. When the school my be several miles away; and the shops; and the doctor; and work (if any), life can be hugely difficult and expensive.

East Sussex is shown to include not only areas of deprivation but deprivation in isolation which may be psychologically even more difficult. We in UckfieldLabour think it very important for Labour to find ways to offer support and engagement with people isolated by circumstances about which they can do little. We have already submitted a policy paper proposing a nationwide online forum to enable people deprived of other political engagement to have a say on matters of importance to them and we are now hoping to work with others in rural constituencies to create a Labour rural/coastal network. Our votes may not carry the weight of those in winnable marginal but our values are just the same and our willingness to contribute to debate and improving the lives of others are as strong.
The full report on deprivation in Sussex can be seen here:
http://www.sussexgiving.org.uk/sussexuncoveredreportlaunch/